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Reframing in Couple and Family Therapy

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Encyclopedia of Couple and Family Therapy

Synonyms

Reframing

Introduction

Reframing is a widely used technique in the growing and evolving discipline of psychotherapy. Family and brief therapies, such as Strategic Family Therapy, utilize reframing to help clients view their problems from an alternate perspective, by labeling issues in ways that designate new, and often positive, meaning to the situations presented in therapy (Mattalia 2001). This new meaning is particularly useful for the purposes of psychotherapy, as new perspectives can evoke new possibilities for one’s experience and create space for the construction of new viable solutions that were otherwise invisible (Murphy and Dillon 2011). The process of proposing and adopting a new perspective is referred to as reframing, which has presented a staple technique in general counseling, taught among a variety of disciplines, and continues to be a tool to help induce therapeutic change. This chapter will explore the nuanced conceptualization and utilization of reframing...

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Correspondence to Jessica Newsome .

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Newsome, J., Mitchell, L., Awosan, C.I. (2019). Reframing in Couple and Family Therapy. In: Lebow, J.L., Chambers, A.L., Breunlin, D.C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Couple and Family Therapy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49425-8_325

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